which had crept into the language from others, particularly when nations have held much intercourse together. We have a copious collection of Scottish proverbs by Kelly; but this learned man was mortified at discovering that many, which he had long believed to have been genuine Scottish, were not only English, but French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek ones; many of his Scottish proverbs are almost literally expressed among the fragments of remote antiquity. It would have surprised him further had he been aware that his Greek originals were themselves but copies, and might have been found in D'Herbelot, Erpenius, and Golius, and in many Asiatic works, which have been more recently introduced to the enlarged knowledge of the European student, who formerly found his most extended researches limited by Hellenistic lore." Perhaps the proverb from the apostolical writings in most frequent circulation, is the one which St. Paul has adopted from Menander, and which, as Dean Alford suggests, may have become, in the days of the apostle, a current commonplace: "Evil communications corrupt good manners." "What stories are new?" asks Thackeray. "All types of all characters march through all fables." "Will it be believed," says Max Mueller, in his essay On the Migration of Fables, "that we, in this Christian country, and in the nineteenth century, teach our children the first, the most important lessons of worldly wisdom, nay, of a more than worldly wisdom, from books borrowed from Buddhists and Brahmans, from heretics and idolaters, and that wise words, spoken a thousand, nay, two thousand years ago, in a lonely village of India, like precious seed scattered broadcast all over the world, still bear fruit a hundred and a thousand fold in that soil which is the most precious before God and man, the soul of a child? No lawgiver, no philosopher has made his influence felt so widely, so deeply, and so permanently as the author of these children's fables. But who was he? We do not know. His name, like the name of many a benefactor of the human race, is forgotten." "Our obligations to genius are the greater," says a British essayist, "because we are seldom able to trace them. We cannot mount up to the sources from which we derive the ideas that make us what we are. Few of my readers may have ever read Chaucer; fewer still the Principia of Newton. Yet how much poorer the minds of all my readers would be if Chaucer and Newton had never written! All the genius of the past is in the atmosphere we breathe at present."